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My mother just sent me two links concerning a Harvard Business School case study of Wikipedia after reading my issues with Wikipedia. The first link is the case study itself, which, like Wikipedia is GFDL-licensed and freely available.

The second is the blog post announcing the case study, and an abstract. I particularly like this bit:

Whether Wikipedia really has become a “post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.”

That’s part of the problem, but a fuller description is that Wikipedia is run by Americans, for Americans, with non-Americans playing a limited role in the central power structure referred to above. Thus, today, my rewritten article on Dhaula Kuan, was marked for deletion because an American consensus decided it was a made up term, to which my solution was to nominate the Circle Interchange and the Mixing Bowl for deletion.

Needless to say, none of the articles is now nominated for deletion.

I created a new account there, though. In retrospect, I should’ve done it before I rewrote all the articles I did.

I was reading a pretty interesting story on Slashdot about the impending death of Windows XP. Well, impending may be too strong a word, but certainly, it’s scheduled and the date is getting closer and closer. The comments were, unexpectedly considering this is Slashdot, very well thought-out and aligned closely with what I’ve thought for quite a while – killing off XP now is akin to Microsoft shooting itself in the foot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wikipedia is a useful tool. Mainly, since my awful experience with the automated bots deleting my entries, marking my entries as spam, blocking my account when I went to fix entries, I’ve stayed clear of editing Wikipedia. In fact, I make it a point not to correct things, even when I see blatant errors in English usage, or things which are clearly wrong.

But the entry on my part of Delhi, Malviya Nagar, was so awful that I was forced to fix some of it, thus violating one of my few permanent resolutions.

I fully suspect, though, by the time I wake up tomorrow, an overzealous bot and/or editor/administrator will swing past and mark the article for deletion or something, because it didn’t make some importance cut that is only known to the Wikipedia insiders, making my contributions useless.

So, in the future, if you’re writing something for Wikipedia, please take a moment out of your busy, busy day to hit the “Show Preview” button and check that you’ve created a readable, grammatically correct and correctly spelled contribution that meets Wikipedia’s style guidelines. If you do, then people will likely not have to edit it, which means that it’s less likely to be noticed by said overzealous insiders, and thus less likely to be deleted in that sheer malicious manner that only Wikipedia editors and bots exhibit.

…please donate it to NASA. Thanks.

Nothing more to say beyond the obvious: if you believe the Beijing government, you’re clinically insane.

Just for this reason alone, I feel like going into politics. If I can help in any way to denounce that barbaric government with an official voice, I would.

Firing up ye olde Apple Software Update (which insists on activating itself even when I try to disable it), I came across a new entry for Apple’s Safari browser, based on WebKit. Aside from the tiny point about “update” which Apple seems to forget when it pushes out a new product, Safari is an awful application except on Mac OS. Its subpixel rendering is subpar; maybe even non-existent. Its widgets do not conform to Windows UI conventions. Oh, and it makes Firefox 2 look like a lean memory machine.

Oh, and Apple is clearly in violation of anti-trust laws in the US – using its (legal) monopoly in one market to push another product. Some other examples:

• Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil. It used that to push certain railway operators.
• AT&T had a monopoly on long-distance telephony. It used that monopoly to push local telephony.
• Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems. It used that monopoly to push a web browser.

Add to this this very clear example:

• Apple has a monopoly on the software used to manage iPods. It uses that monopoly to push a web browser.

Though, now watch the Apple zealots arrive to jump on the argument with half-thought out excuses because it’s anti-Apple. Doesn’t matter if it was an optional update; so was Windows 98 over Windows 95 – Microsoft was still convicted of an anti-trust action. Ditto IE4 over IE3, and IE5 over IE4. You use one monopoly to push another, no matter how easy it is to opt-out, you’re guilty of abusing your monopoly.

I fully suspect that the DoJ will not prosecute though. You’d need a lawyer with guts to stand up to the Slashdot groupthink.

Hey maybe the EU Commission will instead!

I just realized that the theme I installed has a validation note at the bottom that specifies this page is XHTML 1.1 compliant. Since WordPress couldn’t put out compliant code if its life depended on it, that’s clearly not true. I can’t seem to access any ports other than 80 on this network here, so I’ll edit the template when I get home.

However, the website looks as it should according to my checks in Firefox 2.x, 3.x, IE7, IE8, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.25, and the various other browsers I’ve tried it with. I’ll run it through BrowserShots too and see if it looks okay, but my guess is that as mangled as the HTML that WordPress generates is, it should render fine.

Of course, you may not see one or two Flash applets, and pictures, depending on whether you’ve got the correct plugins installed and if you’re using Lynx.

For a long period of time back in high school, when a number of people thought I was going to become a computer engineer, I was interested in astrophysics more than anything. I took IBH Physics because I figured I’d at least have a good chance of getting into astrophysics if I did well in it. One of the unspoken reasons I chose University of Chicago was because it was one school that had a kick-ass physics program. While the economists would have you believe that Chicago is the home to the most economic Nobel prizes, that number is dwarfed by the number of physics Nobels. I actually tried sitting in on a couple of astrophysics classes in college, but I was kicked out once the Professors realized I wasn’t enrolled in the class (thank you so much, Prof. Truran, and Wayne).

Anyway, I ended up an economist. C’est la vie. Too late to change career paths.

But my interest in astrophysics has not suffered for this change in career path, between science fiction and borrowing telescopes and telescope time. However, one resource that I find stunning beyond belief is the pictures from ongoing missions page at NASA’s various control rooms. Some of my favourites:

• MER-A Spirit is exploring the Gusev Crater on Mars (see the panoramic camera shots for the best pictures).
• MER-B Opportunity is exploring Meridiani Planum on Mars (ditto).
• Cassini is orbiting Saturn and exploring the rings and moons of Saturn.
• New Horizons is flying faster than a speeding bullet to Pluto, via Jupiter.
• Messenger is whizzing to a rendezvous with Mercury.

You may notice that I’ve not bothered with the pictures from more remote sensing instruments. I used to be fascinated with the Hubble pictures, and still am, but a realization I’ve slowly come to is that no human will voyage beyond our solar system in my lifetime.

The average life expectancy at birth in India in the 1980s was just over 50 years; my family is long-lived by all comparisons – 80+ years is common. Even if I live that long, it means there are just some 60 years for me to voyage out into space. There’s no way I’m going to make it to the nearest known extrasolar system, ε Eridani, some 10.5 ly distant, without some combination of life extension, hibernation, inertial control and new sources of portable energy. Or the development of viable superluminal travel, which is even less likely. While I have immense faith in the ability of scientists to conquer such barriers, I do not have faith in the governments of humans to actually fund such development.

So rather than stare longingly at the stars, where humans will most likely never step even in two generations, better to look at our own solar system, where prolonged and sustained efforts will likely get us within a human lifetime. Thus, I look forward to moving to Mars when I retire.

I call dibs on Chryse Planitia.

Watching the BBC right now, I find it amazing how unashamedly hypocritical the Chinese government really is.

What’s more likely?

1. Tibetans protest the fact their country was invaded and have been brutally repressed by the Beijing government with isolated incidents of violent actions across Lhasa; or,
2. Tibetans are ordered by the Dalai Lama to violently attack Chinese institutions and Chinese immigrants to Tibet.

If you’re insane, then clearly you’d believe the official line from Beijing that the one person on the planet who has for his entire life dedicated himself to non-violence – someone who refused to arm his people against the Chinese when they invaded his country, killed thousands of his countrymen and women, and brutally repressed his people for decades – is responsible for mass violence. Or, if you’re capable of rational thought, you’d realize that Beijing is lying. As usual. They make the Soviet government under Stalin look like paradise.

It’s disgusting beyond belief. Lying, brutal bastards.

I’m not sure whether there’s some sort of “thing” inside my iPhone, but since I bought it a week or so ago, I’ve got this insatiable urge to move to San Francisco. I suppose the alternative explanation is that those short stories I’ve been reading that place on and along the Junipero Serra Freeway are getting into my head.

Nah.

It’s most definitely the iPhone.